Can We Make It to Mars?

See new space suits, foods, and rockets that may support future Mars-bound astronauts, and meet a Mars rover driver.
Aired August 1, 2012 at 10pm
Aired August 1, 2012 at 10pm

Originally aired 01.11.11

Program Description

(This program is no longer available for streaming.) Can humans survive a trip to Mars and back that could take two to three years? This episode of NOVA scienceNOW examines all of the perils of this journey, including deadly meteoroids, bone and muscle deterioration, and cosmic radiation. Host Neil deGrasse Tyson checks in with scientists who are developing new ways to keep astronauts alive on such a journey. Among the innovations covered are meteoroid-proof materials, new space foods and spacesuits, and novel modes of transport, such as plasma rockets. This episode also profiles young female scientist and daredevil Vandi Verma, part of the team that drives the Mars rovers on the martian surface.

DR.
SMITH JOHNSTON (NASA Flight Surgeon): You would be dead very quickly.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: NASA astronaut Mike
Massimino...

MIKE
MASSIMINO (NASA Astronaut): I feel like an Italian sausage.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: ...looks into a
revolutionary new idea to keep Mars explorers alive and kicking.

Also,
would you eat a piece of meat that's been sitting around for eight years? I
did!

This
NASA lab is cooking up food for the long journey to Mars. Eating in space is
already no picnic, but with or without gravity, some of the space meals are
delicious.

Mmm,
I like that.

But can they stay tasty all the way to Mars?

Now
this looks nasty.

MICHELE PERCHONOK (NASA Food Scientist): That
is.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: All that and more,
on this episode of NOVA scienceNOW.

Four
decades ago, humans first walked on the moon, satisfying our thirst for
exploration. And now we're setting our sights on another rock out there: Mars.

A
trip to the Red Planet would likely cover a half a billion miles, about a
thousand times farther than the Apollo missions. A roundtrip could take two or
three years, and one big challenge is surviving harsh conditions, including
some we don't encounter here on Earth.

Here in the New Mexico desert, home to of all
sorts of top-secret government projects, NASA has built one of the world's most
powerful guns. Some 60 yards long, it targets spaceships, though not alien
spaceships, our own.

The
gun simulates cosmic collisions that will threaten astronauts traveling to
Mars.

So,
you guys call this a gun? But it looks nothing like a gun. I think of a gun, I
think of handguns or rifles. How fast does a rifle bullet go?

The most surprising thing is not the gun's size or
power, but its bullets.

These itty bitty things?

DONALD
HENDERSON: Uh huh.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Twenty thousand
miles an hour?

They represent a danger that could end a mission
to Mars. Space is
not as empty as you might think, but littered with small fragments of comets,
asteroids and planets, called meteoroids. In the vacuum of space, they move at
deadly speeds.

And
NASA's huge gun demonstrates just how dangerous they can be. These metal plates
represent the walls of an unshielded spacecraft.

DONALD
HENDERSON: This is a half-inch projectile,
and it was traveling at about 16,000 miles per hour. It made a hole in the
front plate, and then a slightly larger hole.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: It kept going?

DONALD
HENDERSON: Yes.

So
an astronaut could be right behind this wall.

And this...

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Whoa.

DONALD
HENDERSON: ...is what is left over. It is
essentially...

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Whoa.

DONALD
HENDERSON: ...a shotgun blast.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: The speed of the
impact shattered the bullet, and its debris smashed ever-larger holes in the
inner walls. It's a sobering lesson for NASA.

Meteoroids
have already knocked out or damaged numerous spacecraft, including the probe
Mariner 4, which snapped the first close-up pictures of Mars in 1965.

After
its fly-by...

SIGRID
CLOSE: It
ran into a cloud of meteoroids no bigger than the size of a grain of sand. And
over the course of about 45 minutes, they were seeing thousands of impacts on
the spacecraft.

JERRY
LINENGER: During my time on the Russian
Space Station, all of a sudden, I look, in the corner of my eye, I see the
solar panel just joosh, you know. Instant hole, this big.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: If astronauts are
to survive a mission to Mars, we have to find a way to protect them from
meteoroids. And so, today, the gun will test new lightweight shielding for the
walls of a Mars spaceship.

It doesn't look very protective. This is foam I
can stick my finger in.

DONALD
HENDERSON: But it's a smartly designed
shield, because what happens is the velocity is so fast—of these
projectiles—when they impact, the speed breaks it apart, and then the
rest of this target will absorb the impact.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: So will this shield
stop a projectile going over 16,000 miles an hour?

To
find out, the shield is bolted in the target chamber. Then air is pumped out,
to replicate the vacuum of space. We head to the bunker below for protection
while the gun gets fired.

CONTROLLER(NASA):Three, two, one.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: That was cool.

And the result? Did the shield stop the bullet?

Well, obviously it went through.

CONTROLLER: Yup.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: But just look at
the inner wall:no
penetration. Nothing came out the other side.

CONTROLLER: That's right, it worked.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: The layers of foam,
metal and bulletproof materials pulverized the debris from the impact.

So
this takes out all the energy of those projectiles.

DONALD
HENDERSON: And it stops them.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: So this is where
astronauts can be? They can be cooking breakfast here. They're safe from the
hazards of space.

Well, not really. Meteoroids are only one peril
of many.

JERRY
LINENGER: Systems failing, possibility of
a fire, possibility of losing electrical power—you can go from a perfect
day to a very bad day that quickly.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Some threats aren't
so obvious. In fact, one of the biggest looks like harmless fun.

Many
astronauts report that being weightless is what they love most about space.

CLAYTON
ANDERSON (NASA Astronaut, 1992–1998): I would wake up in the morning and fly to breakfast;
then I would fly to work. I could fly to the bathroom, and I even flew while I
was going to the bathroom. I was Superman every single day.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: But what feels good
may not be so good for you, as Jerry Linenger discovered after spending five
months in zero gravity on the Russian Space Station.

JERRY
LINENGER: By the time I got back, I had
about a 14 percent bone loss. Now that was isolated to hips, lower spine. And
my strength level was probably 65 percent of what I went up there with.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: With no
gravitational force to work against, your body not only doesn't need the same
amount of muscle and bone, it starts breaking them down. As on Earth, so in
space: use it or lose it. And exercise may not solve the problem.

JERRY
LINENGER: I exercised two one-hour periods
every day, religiously. And my personal experience is that the bone loss seems
to keep going on and on.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: And yet, there is a
solution: artificial gravity, a force created by spinning.

You
can see it in the sci-fi classic, 2001: A
Space Odyssey. And you can experience it right now, in this small,
spinning room at Brandeis University, as I did, recently, with
neurophysiologist Janna Kaplan.

JANNA
KAPLAN: Notice
how we talk to each other, but we don't look at each other.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, well, I want
to look at you, but I feel...

JANNA
KAPLAN: Don't!

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: It's hard.

I'm trying to conduct a conversation, but I'm having
trouble turning my head.

The rotation, you see, is generating a
centrifugal force that pushes everything in the room away from its center,
towards the wall. It makes me lean pretty oddly, but, far as my body is
concerned, this force is no different from gravity. To move, I have to work
against it.

Okay, now I've got to turn around.

JANNA
KAPLAN: Now,
turn around slowly. Try to peel off the wall.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: And I mean work.

JANNA
KAPLAN: Peel.
Everything is a peeling motion.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: No chance of
muscles and bones wasting away around here.

JAMES
LACKNER (Brandeis University): It's the centrifugal force which is pushing him
backwards. So, he feels like he's got to fight so hard to get away from the
wall. And he may feel as much as 30 percent heavier.

JANNA
KAPLAN: Always
feel the force.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: May the force be
with me.

JANNA
KAPLAN: Don't
let the force leave you.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Now remember, this
room is on Earth. So, spinning or not, our planet's own gravity is always
pulling us downward. Meanwhile the artificial gravity pushes us backwards. The
two forces combined make things hang in here at odd angles. And this is also
why the room eventually makes some visitors a bit queasy.

But
if I were free of real gravity, artificial gravity would have me jogging
comfortably on the wall, just like they did in 2001.

Now,
building a spinning spaceship isn't practical. But a small spinning room on
board might suffice, giving astronauts an Earth-like exercise space to keep
their bones and muscles from wasting away.

Though
that's not to say Mars explorers will be safe—even remotely, because
they'll still have to face the worst space danger of all, a danger astronauts
see, simply by closing their eyes.

JERRY
LINENGER: I used to sleep upside down, piece
of Velcro around me. Close my eyes, and then I would see a flash and flash,
flash, flash.

MICHAEL
FOALE: You'd
get this single point of light and then a big circle around it, right there in
your brain.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: The flashes are
caused by cosmic rays, subatomic particles, like protons, generated by
exploding stars, far off in our galaxy. Traveling close to light-speed, these
high-energy particles will pierce a spaceship and its astronauts, their
retinas, their brains.

This
doesn't happen on Earth, because our planet's atmosphere and magnetic field
protect us from the constant barrage of cosmic radiation.

JERRY
LINENGER: You go to Mars, you're going to
get a very heavy radiation dose. There is no way to protect against that. You
can't carry lead up into space in a wall that would be thick enough.

MICHAEL
FOALE: There is not much to stop them
because they are so energetic. They are a bullet traveling at an enormous
speed.

Research
continues, but we have yet to find a practical defense against cosmic rays.

JERRY
LINENGER: You go to Mars, you're raising
your risk of cancer, lifelong. But there are always innate risks to space
travel, and there's no way to get around them. And you just do your best to
minimize those risks and control them where you can.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: So we might be able
to protect our Mars explorers from some of the dangers they will face, but only
some. Yet, knowing all that, today's astronauts are undeterred.

PEGGY
WHITSON (NASA Astronaut): In my mind, it's part of our genetic code that we
should explore to see what's beyond the mountain. And I would love to be the
first person to step on another planet.

ANDREW
THOMAS (NASA Astronaut): Just imagine what that would be like. Everything
you see would be completely alien to your experiences here on Earth. It would be
just an amazing, amazing experience.

MICHAEL
FOALE: I would go to Mars under any
condition. I would dearly, dearly like to take my wife with me. Human evolution
involves exploration.

JERRY
LINENGER: And I don't care what the risk
is. That's something, that you actually are moving mankind forward. It is worth
your life, and I'd sign up for that mission in a heartbeat.

Meet
the "water bear."

They're
very small.

They
can survive temperatures as low as -459°F.

>And
as high as 257°F.

They
can go without water and air for at least 10 days.

And
many are able to survive radiation exposure.

It's
the only animal that can survive the harsh conditions of space.

Sign
them up, NASA.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: One thing obviously
lacking in space is air. Now, of course, air is crucial for us to stay alive.
Our bodies need a constant supply of oxygen.

Here
on Earth, air provides something just as essential but much less obvious:
pressure.

Consider
this: a column of air one inch across, stretching from the ground to the top of
Earth's atmosphere, weighs about 15 pounds. That's about the same weight as a
small dog, or a watermelon. We don't feel it, but that weight is constantly
pressing against our bodies and within our lungs. Without it, we'd be dead.

NASA
astronaut Mike Massimino has survived the deadly vacuum of space. We got him to
tell us how and what we need to do before humans can safely walk on Mars.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: Astronauts like me might
not like to admit it, but space is a dangerous place. I've walked in space four
times. That's me doing repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope. Every minute I'm
out there, I know the only thing between me and oblivion is my spacesuit.

The
first step, getting dressed for space, is to put on some undergarments. So now
I have on my T.C.U., or thermal comfort undergarment, which is the slang for
long underwear. And underneath that is my M.A.G., or the maximum absorbency
garment, which is slang for diaper. And that answers the question of "how do
you go to the restroom if you're locked inside of the spacesuit?"

At
roughly 10,000,000 dollars, today's spacesuit is one of the most expensive
garments in the entire solar system. And a lot of that expense goes into
creating something you wouldn't expect: air pressure.

SABRINA
GILMORE (NASA Spacesuit Instructor): Because the astronauts have to take their own
pressure when they're doing their spacewalk, you can think of the spacesuit as,
like, a big bag of air.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: So why is air pressure
so important? What would happen to our bodies without it?

SMITH
JOHNSTON: If somebody gets sucked out of
the space station without a spacesuit, what would happen? Well, that would be a
very bad day.

You
would not explode; you would just slowly expand. And you'd get to a certain
spot, and then, essentially, turn to a goo, a mush, and then sort of vaporize.
You would be dead very quickly.

DAVA
NEWMAN: Basically,
the gas in your lungs and even the solution in your bloodstream would boil.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: The cells in your body
are filled with dissolved gases, like oxygen and nitrogen. Without air pressure
pushing hard against these cells, all that gas is going to bubble out of
solution, just like it does when you open a bottle of soda.

DAVA
NEWMAN: We cannot survive, just the human body, in the vacuum of space. We have
to have protection from a spacesuit.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: But how much air
pressure does the spacesuit need to keep us
alive?

Down
here on Earth, the one atmosphere of air pressure at sea level feels very
comfortable. As you rise up in altitude, there are fewer air molecules around
you, producing less pressure. At 30,000 feet, the height of Mt. Everest, the
pressure drops to only one-third of an atmosphere. Luckily, as long as there's
plenty of oxygen, humans can survive okay in one-third atmosphere, and that's
the amount of pressure they put into the spacesuit.

The
whole spacesuit is pumped full of air, like a balloon. But even that causes a
major problem. It makes the suit incredibly stiff.

SABRINA
GILMORE: You can think of it as like a
football. When a football's not inflated, you could bend it a little bit. But,
when it's pressurized you would not be able to bend it. And the spacesuit's not
that different.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: And all that stiffness
makes the suit extremely hard to move around in.

In
space, I use up a lot of my energy just fighting the suit. The stiffness is
particularly noticeable in the gloves. The pressure that keeps me alive makes
it really difficult to use my hands.

SABRINA
GILMORE: If you took a rubber band and
wrapped it around your fingers, and if you just opened and closed maybe 15, 20
times, you'll get a feeling of what makes it so physically demanding.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: Astronauts have been on
the front lines of the battle between life-saving pressure and mobility since
the beginning of space travel.

By
the time Neil Armstrong made that giant leap for mankind it was clear: leaping
was doable, walking, not so much.

Trust
me. I know. These suits aren't made for walking.

If
we want to send human explorers to Mars, we're going to need a new kind of
spacesuit.

SMITH
JOHNSTON: We have to have much more robust
suits and capabilities, before we can even think about going to Mars.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: Back down on Earth, at
my alma mater, M.I.T., a former classmate, Dava Newman, has set up a space-age
garment district. She's trying to create a new spacesuit, specifically designed
for Mars. Her biggest challenge? Perfecting a whole new way of producing
lifesaving pressure.

DAVA
NEWMAN: My passion is astronaut performance. Is there a different way, a better
way, perhaps, to provide pressure?

MIKE
MASSIMINO: And the solution? Dava
wants to shrink-wrap astronauts and apply the pressure directly to their skin.

Hollywood
has been shrink-wrapping space-traveling actresses for years, but the goal was
purely aesthetic. No one knew if you could build enough pressure into a tight
suit to keep an astronaut alive, so Dava does a lot of experimenting.

DAVA
NEWMAN: Let's roll up your pant leg.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: Alright.

DAVA
NEWMAN: We're going to show you a prototype of mechanical counter-pressure,
meaning where we apply the pressure directly to your skin. We really want you
to have maximum mobility, just like you would in your street clothes.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: Yeah.

DAVA
NEWMAN: So, I'm going to put this suit completely on you, like "shrink-wrap an
astronaut."

We
need to provide a third of an atmosphere, and we've been working on that for
about 10 years. Could we provide enough pressure to keep someone alive?

MIKE
MASSIMINO: One way to find out is
to wrap body parts in super stretchy material to see if you can apply pressure
uniformly, otherwise it could hurt.

I
feel like an Italian sausage. That's what I feel like.

Wrapping
people like sausages is just the beginning. Dava studies human motion, trying
to preserve mobility while maintaining pressure. She even tries out her
spacesuit ideas on a robot.

DAVA
NEWMAN: I'm collecting a lot of data out of the robot because it informs our spacesuit
design.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: But even the tightest
girdle-like bodysuit can't provide quite enough pressure to keep a person alive
in the vacuum of space.

It
just isn't tight enough.

DAVA
NEWMAN: If we put the astronauts into a compression stocking, that's great. But
it still only gets me two-thirds of the way there.

How can I get the rest?

MIKE
MASSIMINO: Looking for inspiration
to solve the problem, Dava turns to the animal kingdom.
The possibilities are endless: the balletic bat, the slithery snake, or
the creature with the highest stature in the animal kingdom: the giraffe?

DAVA
NEWMAN: I always wondered, "Why don't giraffes faint?" That's a tall creature. His
head's down eating on the grass, puts his head up to reach the tree, five
meters. Why doesn't he faint?

MIKE
MASSIMINO: So what about the
giraffe's physiology keeps its blood from rushing out of his head?

MIKE
MASSIMINO: Special muscles in the
giraffe's blood vessels constrict to create pressure. That blocks the blood
from escaping out of his head.

DAVA
NEWMAN: Maybe we can learn from nature—biomimicry—and, as an
engineer, put that into some of our designs.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: The constricting vessels
in the giraffe's upper neck inspired the idea of building additional pressure
into the suit with a tight web of super-strong
red fibers.

DAVA
NEWMAN: Now, what I'm doing is giving you a bit of structure. Through that
structure, I can actually even carry more pressure.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: So if you just had the
complete suit here, without the lines, you'd be able to move around in it fine,
but you wouldn't get the pressure, the protection you need to work in the
vacuum of space.

But
the red lines need to go in just the right places, so they don't inhibit
mobility.

Though
we don't have a complete, full-pressure suit yet, we're getting there, and
Dava's built a slightly looser mockup. This could be the spacesuit of the
future.

I can't wait to see what she looks like.

She
calls it the biosuit.

You
look like a superhero!

DAVA
NEWMAN: I
want to be Elastigirl. Yeah, Elastigirl was one of my favorites.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: You look like
Elastigirl. It's futuristic.

Amazingly,
a combination of tight stretchy fabric and a stiff web of fibers looks like it
can provide the necessary pressure directly to the skin, but it isn't easy.

What
is the hardest part of the body to pressurize in this suit?

DAVA
NEWMAN: It's
definitely the elbows, the joints, and the concave areas: the back of the knees,
armpits. Those areas are really complicated.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: I volunteered to
test-drive her suit in space. Unfortunately, the mockup isn't mission-ready,
and it only comes in ladies sizes.

When
are you going to be ready for primetime?

DAVA
NEWMAN: We
would really need a few more years of research, so that's where we're at in
terms of the development of the suit.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: A fully functional
biosuit will contain smart wires so scientists can monitor your vital signs.
The hard backplate will support the oxygen tanks needed for breathing.

Speaking
of breathing, that part of the suit would be pretty much the same as today,
with a gas-pressurized helmet, but you'll breathe easier.

Dava's
found you could run around in the biosuit and consume about 50 percent less
oxygen than you would in today's bulky suit.

DAVA
NEWMAN: We've proven the technical feasibility. This is possible. We might have
this incredibly different way to design spacesuits for the future.

MIKE
MASSIMINO: I may be too old to go
to the Red Planet, but it's almost certain that the astronauts of tomorrow will
have a very different wardrobe than the one I've been wearing. They'll have
suits that are made for walking.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Even after just a
few days in the fridge, a lot of food can get pretty unappetizing, mostly
because mold and bacteria begin to take over your food. So, imagine eating
meals that had been sitting around for two to three years!

That's
what the astronauts who go to Mars are going to have to do.

I
met some chefs trying to cook up delicious dishes that will provide all the
comforts of home, even when the dining room is 100 million miles away. In a food lab at the Johnson Space Center,
Michele Perchonok heats up pork chops for a taste test.

If
you're the type who likes your food fresh, this isn't the meal for you. One of
these chops has been sitting on a shelf at room temperature for two years, the
other has been lying around for eight. That's right , I said "eight" years.

Can
I tell which one? And will my stomach mind this experience less than it did
artificial gravity? We shall soon find out.

I
think this one is older.

So, in other words, it wasn't obvious to me that
one was eight years old and one was two. But I have to...if I were to guess, I
would say this one, because the meat was just a little mushier, and I'm
thinking maybe it would break down over time.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Michele heads up a
team figuring out how to feed astronauts all the way to Mars and back. The food
will have to be nutritious, last for years, taste good and, of course, behave
itself in zero gravity.

You
see, weightless food tends to do the darndest things, which limits the menu.

SUNITA
WILLIAMS (NASA Astronaut): Anything that can just float in the air easily is a
problem. And it's going to get in people's sleeping bags, it's going to get in
science experiments, it's going to get in people's eyes. One of the reasons I
cut my hair when I was up there was I was worried about people at the dinner
table eating and then a piece of my hair comes by and floats in their mouth.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Astronauts cook by
adding cold or hot water to freeze-dried foods, or heating food pouches in an
electric warmer. A pair of scissors—in space more useful than a fork or
spoon—opens the meals, which, actually, can be pretty good, as I discover
courtesy of Vickie Kloeris, Michele's colleague.

VICKIE KLOERIS: Which was a little difficult for our Russian colleagues to understand.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: And I'll taste
this.

Mm,
I like that.

MICHELE PERCHONOK: That's a very good product.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Good for Earth
orbit, but what about Mars? When it comes to feeding an expedition like that,
problems multiply.

Michele and Vickie must plan 7,000 meals and
snacks to nourish six people for up to three years. And if food is sent ahead
of the astronauts, it will have to keep for five years. Yet only seven of
NASA's 65 thermo-stabilized edibles have that kind of shelf-life. The rest end
up like this.

So, this looks nasty.

MICHELE PERCHONOK: That is very nasty. So what you are looking at here is our
citrus fruit salad, five-year-old versus two-year-old.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So something happened between two and five years. What?

MICHELE PERCHONOK: There's a lot of chemistry going on.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Even if you kill off every microbe in sealed food, it
still contains sugars and proteins that react with each other over time. The
result is obvious when you compare this youthful and geriatric chicken salad.

So the chicken gets darker and the greenery becomes
pale, and it's not just a cosmetic phenomena.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: A solution might be
new packaging that keeps out all water and air, unlike today's plastics.

MICHELE PERCHONOK: With that packaging, we get a about a 9- to 12-month shelf-life. So
there is no way we are going to Mars with this kind of packaging.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Nor can we use
foil, fine for low-earth orbit, but too heavy for Mars, when you're launching
22,000 pounds of food at the cost of a million dollars per pound.

There
is also something else to consider.

JERRY
LINENGER: When you're in space, stuck
inside, basically, a can, food becomes, kind of, a highlight of the day.

CLAYTON
ANDERSON: You have to eat in order to
survive, but what people don't understand, I don't think, is the psychological
aspect of food.

ANDREW
THOMAS: Because it is one the few
pleasures that you have control over. And I think people serving on submarines
have long understood the importance of food for crews' well-being.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Since good food
makes astronauts happy, I asked Michele and Vickie if there's a popular dish
they'd especially like to send to Mars.

VICKIE KLOERIS: Well, I think that would be our shrimp cocktail.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: That sounds good.

VICKIE KLOERIS: Our shrimp cocktail is a freeze-dried product. So this has been
rehydrated.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It's
not only the shrimp, it's the cocktail sauce?

VICKIE KLOERIS: It's the sauce.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: If Earth were
50-million miles away, this would be five stars, but on Earth I've had better
shrimp cocktail at the local...

VICKIE KLOERIS: I certainly hope so.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: It better not have
been freeze-dried for what I was paying for it.

Everyone
loves soda pop!

It
tickles your tummy!

And
makes you burp!

But
never drink soda pop in zero gravity...

Because
everything you eat and drink just floats around in there...

So
when you burp, it isn't just air that comes out!

Sorry.

That's
why astronauts don't bring soda pop to space.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: If you have to
cross a great distance with no pit stops, the slower you go, the more supplies
you're forced to carry. And if your route takes you through dangerous
territory, all the more reason to speed things up.

That's
especially true for a roundtrip to Mars, which, with current technology, might
take two or three years.

JAKE
WARD (Correspondent): The space between Earth and Mars is filled with
stuff that can kill you: meteoroids can smash your spaceship to bits; zero
gravity eats away at your bones; and cosmic rays increase your odds of getting
cancer. The risks all get worse the longer the trip. Right now, the best
rockets would take two and a half years to get us there and back.

MICHAEL
FOALE: Two and a half years is what I see
as the biggest risk going to Mars.

JAKE
WARD: Why so long? The problem is fuel.

The
fuel in this shuttle tank weighs almost a million pounds, and that just gets
you into near-earth orbit. Mars is still more than 35,000,000 miles away. You
can't carry enough fuel to fire engines all the way to Mars. In fact, a
chemical rocket would empty its gas tank just escaping Earth's gravity and then
would let momentum carry it the rest of the way.

EDGAR
BERING (Astrophysicist, University of
Houston): Now, the problem with
that is that you're coasting the whole way.

JAKE
WARD: Which
takes a very long time.

EDGAR
BERING: The
other problem with that is that if anything goes wrong, you're stuck. You have
no abort capability in mid-flight.

JAKE
WARD: Former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz is well
aware of the dangers of such a mission.

FRANKLIN
CHANG-DIAZ (Astrophysicist, Ad Astra
Rocket Company): At that point,
you have no choice but just to continue to go. And, god forbid, you lose
propellant or you lose an oxygen tank, and it's not going to be possible to
return. And we would watch this crew die, for months, in front of the whole
world.

JAKE
WARD: To make sure this doesn't happen, engineers are
designing new kinds of rockets that could go much faster and more efficiently.
They range from water vapor thrusters to going nuclear, but none can get a crew
to Mars and back in less than a year.

So, this is it.

FRANKLIN
CHANG-DIAZ: This is it.

JAKE
WARD: But
here, outside Houston, Chang-Diaz and his team are building a potentially game
changing rocket called the VASIMR.

FRANKLIN
CHANG-DIAZ: The ultimate goal is to have a
small sun in the engine.

JAKE
WARD: A
sun in the engine? Well, kind of. The VASIMR uses radio waves to heat argon gas
to a million degrees, so hot it becomes a plasma. The sun is made of plasma. In
a plasma, atoms break down into a soup of charged particles that move very,
very fast. And if you fire these very hot, very fast particles out the back of
a spaceship, you've got a rocket that can really move.

But
putting this sun in the engine creates some new problems.

Think
of this candle as a conventional rocket. It's plenty hot, but VASIMR, it's
really a whole other ball of wax.

Test firings have already topped a million
degrees, thousands of times hotter than a chemical engine.

So
the challenge for VASIMR is: how do you keep an engine this hot from destroying
everything around it?

LAWRENCE DEAN (Ad Astra Rocket Company) This is 3/16 stainless, and it was in the way of
the plume coming out.

JAKE
WARD: Wow!

LAWRENCE DEAN
: It did a pretty good job on it.

JAKE
WARD: I
don't know much, but this is broken. I know that much. Holy cow.

Fortunately, there may be a solution: magnets. If
you can encircle the million-degree plasma with a strong magnetic field, it
will form a heat shield and stop the plasma from destroying its surroundings.

With
this shield in place, Franklin thinks the VASIMR can go 35 miles per second,
through space. That's fast enough to get from New York to Los Angeles in
roughly a minute and a half.

That
means you could cut down the roundtrip to Mars from two and a half years in a
chemical rocket, to just five months. And by getting about 5,000 miles to the
gallon, you'd be lugging around a much smaller
gas tank.

In
2014, they plan to test the VASIMR engine in space, for the first time, when
they attach it to the International Space Station. After that, they hope to get
it ready for deep space travel. And if it's successful...

FRANKLIN
CHANG-DIAZ: It completely opens up not
just a mission to Mars, but it opens up, potentially, the entire solar system
to human exploration.

Don't
like the high cost of rocket fuel?

Tired of
racing around in space?

Wouldn't
it just be great to slow down and enjoy the ride?

Yes. One
day we might just be sailing through space!

Light
from the sun actually pushes against reflective surfaces.

And if
they are large enough, they can propel a vessel through space.

And
scientists have already launched some successful tests.

So how
long would it take to get to Mars?

A little
over two years!

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: It might take a
while before we have the technology to get a human safely to Mars, but, in the
meantime, we're already exploring the Red Planet.

So,
what's it like on Mars?

ROBOT: What's
it like? It's freezing, that's what. And the dust!

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Alright, move five
meters to the right, and pick up that rock.

ROBOT: That's
easy for you to say. You know what dust can do to your servos?

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, come on. Give
it a try!

ROBOT: Give
it a try? I don't believe this guy.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, so today's
Martian robot explorers don't have this much attitude. But in this episode's
profile, we meet a designer who thinks maybe they should.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: She constantly
looks for new discoveries to make and obstacles to overcome, from climbing
mountains to flying planes to her job as a rover driver at NASA.

VANDI
VERMA: I've always loved exploring the environment I was in,
and the rovers allow me to explore another planet.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Humans may be
decades away from visiting Mars, but Vandi gets a first-hand look at the Red
Planet every day she goes to work.

PAUL
TOMPKINS (Space Robotics Engineer/Vandi
Verma's Husband): Through being
at that console, she gets direct virtual presence on the surface of Mars in a
way very few other people in the world do.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: She is one of the
people responsible for making sure the rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, make it
through each drive safely.

NASA
originally scheduled the mission to last just 90 days, but that was back in
2004, and the vigilance of drivers like Vandi has kept the rovers alive and
exploring much longer.

Vandi
began dreaming of this interplanetary adventure back in 1997, when NASA sent
another rover, Sojourner, to Mars.

VANDI
VERMA: So, when the very first Mars rover landed, I
remember reading about it, and I was just amazed because it was such an amazing
thing to do, to accomplish, to get a rover on another planet. And I was like, "Someday,
I want to work on that."

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Her passion for
out-of-this-world exploration traces back to her childhood in India.

VANDI
VERMA: I first became interested when somebody gave me this
little book about space. And it was the first time I realized just how vast the
universe was, and just how different the various planets, even in our own solar
system was. And I wanted to see them. It seemed like a very remote possibility,
but I never gave up hope for it.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: The odds were
stacked against her. Growing up in a traditional Indian family, Vandi was
expected to follow her mother's wishes, to settle down and enter an arranged
marriage with a nice Indian husband.

VANDI
VERMA: My parents have an arranged marriage. My sister has
an arranged marriage. For whatever reason, it wasn't something that I was ready
for.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Vandi dreamed of
following a different path, inspired by her father, an air force pilot. Unlike
her cautious mother, her dad encouraged her to take risks and seek adventure.

After
high school, she took her first big step. She moved to the United States and
studied engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. But that didn't stop Vandi's
mother from trying to arrange a marriage for her.

VANDI
VERMA: She would find people in Pittsburgh, when I lived
there. I was amazed. And they would call me.

PAUL
TOMPKINS: Like
Vandi, I've been in love with space for as long as I can remember.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: In 2005, they
decided to spend their lives together.

VANDI
VERMA: We both love adventure.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: They share a love
for taking risks but not chances.

VANDI
VERMA: It's very natural for me to take risk. At the same
time, it's calculated risk.

PAUL
TOMPKINS: So, she has the element of adventure on one side, but
then she's smart about it, because she's not going to take a foolhardy
risk.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: She realized that
this calculated risk mindset would also help navigate her new field.

VANDI
VERMA: I discovered robotics when I was at Carnegie Mellon,
and, instantly, I knew this was what I wanted to do. Robots are incredible for
exploring space or any areas where it's hard to send humans, because we don't
have to worry about survival, you know, food and water.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: While getting her Ph.D.,
Vandi headed to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to hone her robot-driving skills
in its Mars-like terrain.

VANDI
VERMA: Atacama is a place where they measure rainfall in
millimeters per decade. And that was a perfect place for us to take our robot
and do an astrobiology experiment, to look for life.

My
research focused on making sure that the robots could handle unanticipated
situations.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: This work caught
the attention of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab who offered her the chance to
explore the surface of another planet, from a distance.

PAUL
TOMPKINS: Really,
the center of the world, when it comes to robotics, is at Jet Propulsion
Laboratory.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: So she headed to
Pasadena, California, to join the Mars rover team and brought her motorcycle
with her.

VANDI
VERMA: Mostly, I use it as a commuting bike, to get from
home to work, but I'd always take the longest path possible and the most
swervy.

PAUL
TOMPKINS: Her means of transport was
another way to get a little adventure out of life.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: As a rover driver,
she pushes Spirit and Opportunity to get as much data as possible without
breaking them.

VANDI
VERMA: Safety's the biggest concern, but you can't be so
risk-averse that you don't go anywhere.

We
don't use a remote control to drive them, so we're not driving them in real
time. We get, we get the conditions under which the robot is in today, use
those, and plan a drive, and then we send it to the rover and the rover
executes it on its own. And then, once it's complete, it sends us back the
information.

VANDI
VERMA: There is no G.P.S. on Mars. You can't just say, "Hey,"
you know, "this is this location. Drive to that location." So, just moving the
rovers, there's a certain amount of risk.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: And there's little
room for error when driving on another planet.

JOHN
CALLAS: Mars
is a very dangerous place. It has very little atmosphere, the temperatures are
incredibly cold, there are huge changes in temperature every day. So these rovers
have to endure that kind of environment. They are solar-powered. So if the
rovers get too cold, or if they get starved for energy—which is just the
same way a human being is starving—they could die.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: Since some of the
most interesting places are the hardest to get to, the rovers constantly face
the danger of getting stuck. And the drivers brainstorm different ways to get
them out and then try out these techniques in a replica of the surface of Mars,
called the "sandbox."

VANDI
VERMA: There isn't one obvious right way to think. You want
to explore the options. So, the sandbox is a great way to do that, because you
have one chance on Mars, but in the sandbox you can reset and say, "Well that
didn't work, let's try a different strategy."

You
may choose to drive forward, you may choose to try to do it with a slight turn,
an uphill turn, or drive backwards, maybe wiggle the wheels, in order to loosen
the terrain up. Once we figure out what solution works best, then we do it on
Mars, with that one chance we have on Mars.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: The J.P.L. team has
avoided an end of mission since 2004. That's more than 25 times longer than the
original plan. And this run has been key to the rover program's revolutionizing
our knowledge of Mars.

VANDI
VERMA: The rovers have detected signs of past water. We've
detected minerals that show that there was water.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: And since water is
the elixir of life as we know it, these findings suggest fantastic possibilities.

JOHN
CALLAS: What
the rovers have found is that Mars, at one time, was much more like the earth
than it is today. And this is very exciting and very intriguing, because if it
was like the earth at a time when life started on the earth, did life start on
Mars, or is there life there today?

VANDI
VERMA: Whenever you see some sort of a discovery made by
the rovers, you sort of feel like you helped them along. It is a little bit
parental feeling that, hey, you know, I'm proud of that rover.

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: And like the rovers
she drives, Vandi continues to create her own path and make new discoveries.

VANDI
VERMA: When I was growing up, I always thought it would be
really cool to work in space. And it just seemed so impossible, because everything
that was going on at that time was halfway across the world. And now, when I do
look back upon it, it is very amazing to think that wow, I am very fortunate to
be able to live what I dreamt about.

How fast is
the rover?

Pitted
against a snail and a tortoise...

...let's see
how fast they can run the 100 meter.

10 minutes
later...

20 minutes
later...

Yes, the
tortoise won the 100m!

How did
everyone do?

The snail: 2
hours, 4 minutes

The rover: 33
minutes, 20 seconds

The tortoise:
21 minutes, 56 seconds!

A new world
champion!

NEIL
DEGRASSE TYSON: And now for some
final thoughts on space travel.

In
the early days of the great ocean voyages, the explorers and shipmates were
brave...or crazy. During their yearlong voyages, they risked, and often succumbed
to, scurvy, dehydration, starvation, disease, pestilence, hostile natives and,
of course, shipwreck.

These
were the known challenges. Add some mysterious unknowns like: "Is Earth's edge
just over the horizon?" Or "Do demons lurk there?" and you've got a voyage that
few, if any of us, would ever take. Yet some humans embrace these risks, and
our species owes them boundless gratitude.

With
space as the next long-voyage frontier, another laundry-list of life
threatening challenges await us: food spoilage, wayward space debris, loss of
health in zero-G, psychological effects of isolation, and, once again,
shipwreck.

Now,
consider that, in 1950, the risk of asteroid fragments colliding with your
spaceship was not only unknown, it was undreamt of. Same holds for the damage
that solar flares pose to the D.N.A. of spacefarers.

Today,
these are known unknowns: we know they're out there, and even though we won't
always know when they'll strike, we can, in principle, protect against them.

But
what's scarier than known unknowns are unknown unknowns: stuff we haven't
thought of yet but would put an astronaut's health or life at risk, such as....

Ha!
We haven't thought of it yet. That's why we call them unknown unknowns. And
that's why, to explorers—today we call them astronauts)—the
frontier will forever be "the home of the brave."

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.
0917517. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.